Dates: Fri, Apr 26, 2019 to Mon, May 13, 2019
Location: Sesnon Gallery, Porter Faculty Gallery
RECEIVERSHIP: DANM 2019 MFA Exhibition
APRIL 26 – MAY 12, 2019
Digital Arts Research Center (DARC), Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery and Porter Faculty Gallery
Hours: 12 – 5pm daily
The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) program presents Receivership, its 2019 MFA Thesis Exhibition. The exhibition represents the culmination of two years of intensive study and creative work, encompassing a range of artistic practices and approaches to the use and examination of new media. The Digital Art/New Media MFA program of UC Santa Cruz brings together the arts, digital technologies, the humanities, and the sciences to produce artworks and scholarly research that together examine culture, society, and the digital world.
OPENING SATURDAY, APRIL 27
Artist Talks: 2 – 4pm DARC 308
Artists in Galleries: 4 – 5pm
Reception with Artists: 5 – 6pm at Porter College Koi Pond below the Sesnon Gallery
Artists:
- Shimul Chowdhury
- Kathleen Deck
- Kavi Duvvoori
- Keegan Farrell
- Richard Grillotti
- Chelsea Jones
- Yanzi Li
- Jordan Magnuson
- Avital Meshi
- Matthew Mitchell
- Zoe Sandoval
- Laura Stevenson
- Gregory Sullo
Curator’s Statement:
The 2019 DANM MFA exhibition represents the culmination of two years of intensive study
and creative work, encompassing a range of artistic practices and approaches to the use of
new media. Selected by the graduating artists themselves, Receivership, the exhibition’s
title, alludes jointly to the conditions of production and reception in art, and pointedly calls
out the historical moment that has shaped their work and lives here.
The artists in this cohort began their graduate studies in the autumn of 2016. Since that
time, fundamental assumptions and structures governing human institutions have been
shaken at the international, national, and local levels, calling forth an aesthetics of
engagement and resistance. That spirit is visible in a number of the works in this exhibition.
At the same time, other pieces subtly explore processes of perception and aesthetic
reception; they create immersive, deeply interactive experiences of sound, language, color,
natural processes, and the human experience.
Like the DANM program, these artists adopt an interdisciplinary stance, even as they
approach digital technology as a basic component of 21 st century art. They embrace video,
virtual reality, the internet, computer programming, photography, sound, music, and related analog processes as baseline tools for making art.
Yet technology, if omnipresent, is never an end in itself. It is a tool, a domain, and a
condition to be harnessed in the service of something greater. This work testifies to the
power of art experience, and to its capacity to impact human lives and the social world.
John S. Weber
Curator of the 2019 DANM MFA Exhibition
Director of the UCSC Institute of the Art and Sciences












